The Day the Earth Stood Still
by SoloMoon
Summary: Tom survives Rachel's assassination attempt; the yeerk in his head does not. Now he's left dealing with the aftermath of his infestation in a world that is still reeling from the revelations of the yeerk-human war, although all he really cares about is looking out for Jake and the rest of their shattered family. AU (fix fic) for The Beginning; otherwise canon-compliant.
1. Moribund

A/N: Written to the sounds of "Dare You to Move," Switchfoot ( watch?v=jE-Krlqi4fk)

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><p>My name is Tom. Just Tom, I guess, although you all know who I am. And I was infested for over three years.<p>

The story of how I ended up with a yeerk in my head is about what you'd expect: I went to a Sharing meeting alone and left with a passenger. That story's boring, and doesn't have a happy ending.

How I ended up uninfested? That's a little more interesting.

That happened on the Blade Ship.

The entire world was going to hell around me. The yeerk empire was hours away from finishing the battle that would give them control of Earth. The Animorphs might already be dead, and the collection of morph-capable Controllers on this one ship represented a threat almost as great as the entire rest of the yeerk army. My particular problem was a little more small-scale: my cousin was trying to kill me, and Essa 412, the alien slug currently wrapped around my brain, was doing everything in its power to stop that from happening.

My body fell onto the deck of the ship, and before the yeerk in my brain had time to move it, seven hundred pounds of angry grizzly bear landed on top.

Rachel was up and moving in a second, already running across the deck as if unaware that she had just killed me. Crushed my entire body like a sledgehammer landing on top of a watermelon, reducing my ribcage and pelvis to a shattered mess of fragments, forcing chunks of skull through my skin so that blood and bile and brain fluid leaked out onto the floor. She left me there on the floor, drowning in my own blood as the yeerk in my head futilely struggled to inhale using lungs that had just been popped like a pair of water balloons.

The pain alone would have killed me if the Essa 412 hadn't been the one in control, screaming in my mind from the incomprehensible shock and agony, writhing helplessly on the inside of my cracked-open skull but still understanding how hard it had to fight to cling to life.

There was a part of my body beyond thought, beyond comprehension, that fought the oncoming darkness like a rabid animal attacking a brick wall until it tore its own claws off in its frenzy. But there was another, smaller voice that remembered what had happened, realized where I was, and thought _yeah, this is okay_. The tiny part of myself that was still me after all those years, even in that moment, thought it might be okay to rest for once. That maybe I'd get to take Essa down with me.

In those few seconds, I was actually at peace. Chalk it up to shock if you will, but dying didn't seem like such a bad idea at the time.

And then-something changed.

I was too far gone to understand what had happened at first, why I felt a brief warm stickiness on my cheek and the hand I hadn't even realized I'd been trying to move suddenly clenched together in a fist on the deck. I don't think I made any kind of conscious decision-I think I was beyond conscious thought the moment Rachel shattered my skull-but there was a second in which the rational part of my mind that wanted to die and the animal instincts that wanted to live fought, and instinct won. It didn't so much choose a morph as it chose _life_, threw every ounce of willpower I hadn't wasted on fighting Essa 412 into the task of lungs and bones and a body that could still survive.

The change happened slowly, and it _hurt_, even worse than the pain of crushed organs. My body had already been far too long without oxygen-another ten seconds and I would have been dead-but even so the pain felt as though it stole my ability to breathe, whited out my mind to anything other than the nerve signals screaming all over _no no bad no make it stop no NO-_

And then it was over, and I was lying on the deck of the Blade Ship in a still-warm puddle of my own blood as I completed the change and the cobra mind slid into place. It was only then, when I lifted my head up to look around and saw the small grey shape sliding across the deck next to me, that I understood what had happened. Essa 412 had abandoned my body, assuming it was too badly damaged to save, even through morphing. And now it was a helpless blob of tissue on the floor, and I was a sixteen-foot-long apex predator capable of strangling a buffalo in its coils. And when I flicked my forked tongue out between my fangs, I could literally _smell_ its fear.

Funny, how tiny the monster looked as it scrunched and slid its body in a laughably futile attempt to escape across the deck.

In a motion too fast for human eyes to follow I snapped my neck forward and sank my fangs into the yeerk deep enough that my teeth clicked together clear through the slug body, not letting go until I felt the venom sacs empty enough neurotoxin to kill a full-grown elephant into that tiny body. I let Essa 412 fall back to the floor, watching as the yeerk stiffened and shriveled.

Distantly I could hear Rachel laughing in thought-speak as she taunted the other controllers, swaggeringly confident even as Navar 5515 slammed into her side in cape buffalo morph and Erda 781 sank lioness teeth into her neck. I understood her strategy well enough-she was trying to inflict as much damage to the controls of the ship as possible. The Blade Ship was already tilting, sliding out of control on the very outer edge of Earth's atmosphere. Even as I watched Ysa 301 tumbled past in human morph and slid out of the hole the Pool Ship's weapons had torn in the outer hull, screaming helplessly. I flinched, thinking of the poor girl trapped in there who was about to die horribly.

What I didn't understand at all was _Jake's_ strategy. Where the hell was her backup? I could clearly see him standing with all of the other Animorphs on the comm screen to the Pool Ship, so how did he plan on getting Rachel out of here?

I was frozen, watching the battle play out without doing anything. I should help. I should move away. I glanced at the comm screen again; the other Animorphs were watching Rachel fight with coldly solemn expressions, not making any move either to help or to flee. What the hell?

She was still holding her own, but she was grossly outnumbered and I could see that a lot of the blood matting her dark fur was her own. She was going to lose this fight unless something changed soon. If I tried to help, would I be a distraction, would I just get chopped in half by grizzly claws for my trouble, or would I have the chance to save her? It was the first real choice that I'd faced in God only knew how long, and I was paralyzed.

{Jake?} I asked, trying out my own thought-speak voice for the first time.

Other than a slight tensing of the tiger's jaw, he gave no sign that he'd heard me. Of course. He thought I was still infested. He had sent Rachel to kill me.

He'd sent Rachel to kill me. Without backup. Without an exit plan.

He planned to kill us both. My sixteen-year-old, sweet, awkward baby brother who couldn't dribble a basketball to save his life and whose definition of cleaning his room consisted mostly of shoving everything he owned underneath his bed and hoping our mom wouldn't notice, who could spend over twenty minutes coaxing the ugliest-looking spider into a paper cup to toss outside rather than squash a bug.

He planned on killing Rachel. And me.

The knowledge winded me. And then it spurred me into action.

I surged forward and sank my fangs into the ankle of the nearest Controller. I couldn't tell who it was-one of the ones in lioness morph-but even without the full load of poison it worked, sending the host crashing to the deck in a heap, forced to remorph before rejoining the fight. The poison wouldn't kill the Controller fast enough to prevent her from morphing again and wading back in, but it would buy Rachel some time.

I slithered around the edges of the fray at the center of the Blade Ship's deck, trying to stay out of Rachel's sight-she would probably try to kill me if either she or Jake realized I was still alive-and biting two more Controllers before I felt the cobra body run out of venom.

I was gasping for air, trying to figure out what to do next and remembering yet again that snakes can move incredibly fast in the moment but have no stamina to speak of, when the whole ship tilted again and suddenly I was sliding and rolling across the slick metal deck.

The snake brain flipped out, unable to comprehend what was happening and why the ground was so smooth, as the whole world tumbled crazily around us. The human side of my brain was freaking out too, caught somewhere between wondering idiotically why the yeerk didn't do something to stop us and trying to flail arms I didn't currently have to stop us from falling any faster.

Everything tumbled past too quickly for me to take it in as I fell toward the far side of the ship. Something with claws-either Rachel or one of the Controllers who had noticed I wasn't infested anymore-took a swipe at me and missed.

I had a half-second to hope that I would just slam into one of the instrument panels or windows on the Blade Ship, and then I fell through the hole in the deck and plummeted to my death after less than thirty seconds of freedom.

The last thing I heard before I fell was Rachel's drawn-out scream of pain and rage, echoing silently through my mind.

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><p>The wind rushed past quickly enough to rip the air out of my lungs, the shock of cold so great that it actually took me a (precious, dangerous) second to realize that I was in free-fall.<p>

{Shit!} I said to no one, and then {Morph, dumbass!} to myself.

I don't know if any of you have the slightest clue how _unbelievably difficult_ it is to concentrate on having human fingers and human eyelashes and human kneecaps while falling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour and about ten seconds away from ending up a snake-shaped red spatter on the ground. In case you were wondering, it's _unbelievably fucking difficult_.

Amazing what that blind animal instinct can do for you, though, because I was doing it. Limbs were sprouting out of my spine like weird misshapen tumors, my body was twisting like an amoeba under a microscope that was trying to split itself in half, and hideous patches of human skin were appearing between my scales.

Even before I'd finished demorphing all the way I was already morphing again, trying to remember the golden eagle's wings and talons and crazy-sharp eyes. I was a disgusting amalgamation of body parts, feathers on a serpent body still twisting crazily through the air while a human mind inside screamed helplessly and knew that no one could hear, a mythological monster seconds away from becoming a twisted pile of meat on the ground.

It was completely insane; I was morphing in two directions at once, my brain chanting _human-bird, human-bird_ one body part at a time. My spine crunched as it compacted together and then hollowed out. My fingers appeared for half a second at the end of my still scale-covered arm before they elongated and fused back together into a wing.

I was drifting, just starting to glide a tiny bit on malformed wings that couldn't properly lift a human body with a snake's head, when I slammed into the ground and everything went black.

* * *

><p>I lost time. I'm not sure how much, just that it was less than two hours because when I woke up I couldn't feel anything but pain and yet I could see myself starting to demorph, driven automatically away from the agony of those hollow little bones shattered under the skin and toward familiar humanity.<p>

It took a long, long time to demorph, lying there on the grass with black patches all around the edges of my vision, but each tiny victory back toward my original body made the next one easier by lessening the pain.

And then it was over. And I was just a human boy lying on his back on the patch of grass between a McDonald's and a furniture store. I just stayed there for a few seconds, trying to remember if I'd ever known the trick to calming down enough that I no longer felt like I was going to throw up from breathing too hard back when I'd been in control of my own body.

When it had been over a minute and I was still gasping air in and out so quickly my lungs hurt but I felt a little less like I was going to pass out again, I planted a shaking hand into the grass next to me and tried to push myself upright. Something went wrong with the motion and all I succeeded in doing was flopping over onto my stomach and getting a mouthful of herbicide-flavored grass.

Rachel.

Jake.

They needed me.

They were going to fucking die.

They were going to die up there while I lay here in the grass having a useless freak-out over the fact that I had just _not_ died like a useless fucking baby.

My anger at myself was enough to get me past thinking about how to get to my feet and actually just doing it. I almost tipped over the second I was on my feet, ridiculously clumsy from not having moved my own body in way too long, but regained my balance by throwing out my arms like a drunk toddler.

I took my first two steps as a free human being, already concentrating on the golden eagle again even though I wanted to do nothing more than sit back down and shake until I fell apart, and came face-to-face with the muzzle of an assault rifle.

"Resume your original form immediately or I will open fire!" the soldier holding the gun barked.

I froze, blinking in surprise. In half a second there were seven guys in army fatigues surrounding me, all with guns pointed at my head.

"I repeat," the soldier yelled, as though we were standing way further apart than we actually were. "Resume your original form or we will shoot to kill!"

Slowly I held up my hands, as much to look disarming as to show them that the feathers were disappearing off my arms and my joints were flexing back into human shape. "Look," I said. The word came out garbled; I pressed my lips together, concentrated for a second, and then tried again. "There's something you should know-"

"Silence!" the soldier snapped.

I sighed but didn't say anything.

"Now," he said, more calmly, "Exit your host immediately."

Oh, _shit_. "I'm not-"

"There's no need to speak, just exit the human host. Now!"

"I swear to god I don't have a yeerk in my head," I said tiredly, knowing even as I did that it would do no good.

A different soldier to my left spoke up. He was older than the others, his face lined and creased with a long scar across his forehead. If he wasn't the one in charge, the others certainly looked at him like he was. "If you surrender now and release the human you are holding, then you will be held under the protections specified by the third Geneva Convention for prisoners of war, and you will not be harmed." He tightened his grip on the gun he was pointing at my head and added, "If you do not, then you will be an enemy combatant holding a human against his will and we will have no choice but to execute you."

"Wait!" I said. "Don't-" I stopped, frantically trying to think of any reason I could possibly give them to let me go. "What makes you think I'm even a Controller?" I asked.

"The local police force reported seeing you using stolen andalite morphing technology," the guy in front of me said. "You have no legitimate grounds to have access to that technology."

The older soldier with the scar cleared his throat. "That's not to mention the fact that, according to their call, you fell out of the sky a few minutes ago. Wanna explain that one in a way that doesn't involve aliens, son?"

I opened my mouth and closed it again, trying to come up with any steps between where I was now and my frantic need to morph and take off again, find Jake and Rachel and save them.

"How do you know I'm not an Animorph?" I said at last. "Aren't there, like, thirty of them these days?"

Two of the guys with guns exchanged glances; apparently they hadn't thought of that. "If you are then we'll find out three days from now," the younger soldier said at last.

"You can't do that," I blurted.

"If you're not a Controller, why would you object to us holding you until we can confirm that fact?" he said.

"Because my kid brother is up there," I said, pointing to the speck of the Pool Ship just visible in the sky above us. "And he's surrounded by a hell of a lot of yeerks who all want him dead, and if you don't let me go help him then-" I stopped, not daring to complete the thought out loud. Jake and Rachel would be fine. They had to be.

"You know we can't let you do that," the soldier said.

"You have to." I knew that there was no point even as I was saying it, but I'd be damned if I was just going to stand there and let them lock me away while Rachel was fighting for her life and I could do something about it.

"You have one more chance to exit your host, and then we will be transporting you back to containment where you will be held without access to Kandrona until such time as you are forced to exit your host," he recited.

"Can't you do a brain scan or something?" I asked desperately. "There has to be a hospital somewhere nearby. You can just take me there, give me an MRI or whatever, and when you see that I'm telling the truth you can-"

"That's it," he said. "You're coming with us. If you attempt to escape or show any signs of morphing, you will be shot in the head. Do I make myself clear?"

What choice did I have? I went with them.

They loaded me into the back of an armored truck with about eight other heavily armed soldiers and drove for about an hour. They put handcuffs on me, although they had to know that if I wanted to escape I could morph my way out of them in about two seconds.

It made me a tiny bit perversely hopeful to realize that they actually weren't underestimating the potential danger of a morph-capable human, even one who was alone and unarmed. Maybe humanity knew what it was doing against the yeerks after all. Maybe we little primates actually stood a fighting chance against the empire's worth of aliens that was even now crashing down on our planet, now that the secret was out in the open. Maybe there were other people capable of helping the Animorphs even if I couldn't.

Maybe humanity would have actually stood a chance in hell if we'd ever managed to invent a type of space flight capable of doing more than clumsily flinging itself into the nearest gravity well and hoping for the best.

"Where are we?" I asked the group at large, several minutes after giving up pleading with the new group of soldiers just to cut my brain open already and prove I wasn't being controlled.

None of them answered for several seconds, and then a woman with a dark buzz cut and a slightly more relaxed posture than any of the others sighed and said, "Arlington, Virginia."

I nodded like that meant something to me. East coast, I thought, although I wasn't even totally sure about that much.

"Please, can't you do something to confirm I'm not a Controller?" I asked. "I need to-"

She pressed her lips together and looked away from me. I gave up again.

The truck lurched to a stop and one of the guys next to me nudged me with the muzzle of his gun to indicate I should get out. I gave him a sharp look and considered saying something rude in response, but I wasn't more pissed off than stupid so I settled for stumbling to my feet and stepping clumsily out of the back door.

We were at a military base of some kind, I could see; there was a huge American flag snapping against the wind on a pole out front and the barbed-wire fence surrounding the compound was covered in No Trespassing signs.

They led me into a back room of the nearest building in the compound, past a row of mostly-filled prison cells, and ushered me into a ten-by-ten plexiglass box that contained a cot, a small toilet, a few tiny air vents, and three surveillance cameras. One of the soldiers took the cuffs off me before exiting through a door that slid out of the wall and then back in without leaving any seams behind.

There was an Anti-Morphing Ray pointed at the box I was in and the two cells on either side of it, scanning back and forth from the pedestal outside. Even if I'd had a morph small enough that it might be able to squeeze through one of the extremely narrow air vents near the ceiling, and even if I hadn't thought that any attempt to start morphing would probably result in a bunch of army guys coming back and shooting me halfway through, I wouldn't have bothered for the AMR alone. The things were notoriously unreliable-the first model hadn't worked at all and its designers had been fed to taxxons, the second model had fried the half a dozen morph-capable Controllers that Visser Three tested it on, and the third model was still in the works when Essa 412 had started a revolution and left all main yeerk communication. Either way, I wasn't about to risk pissing the thing off.

The soldiers with guns were a different story.

They first came back a while later-I wasn't sure how long it was, I wasn't wearing a watch and there were no clocks visible from my cell-dragging a little girl who was screaming and twisting in and out of a vulture morph. I jumped up as soon as I saw them and, once the little girl was stowed in the cell next to mine, started banging on the wall.

"Hey!" I yelled. "Hey, let me out!"

Three of the soldiers glanced at me and then left without saying anything. The fourth sighed and walked over to me. "Shut up," she snarled.

"You have to let me out!" I told her. "I'm not infested! I was, but it's gone now-"

She rolled her eyes. "Do you have any idea how many times I've heard that today?"

"Fine, then!" I was still yelling, even though the plexiglass wasn't soundproofed and I could hear her talking at a normal volume just fine. "Do a brain scan or something if you want proof, but you have to let me go, _now_! My little brother and my cousin are both still up there, and if I don't help them, they could die! They could be-" My voice failed. I could feel my hands shaking. It was probably already too late to do anything to help Rachel, and I had no idea about Jake.

The soldier's expression softened a little. "I'm sorry," she said. "Just in case you're telling the truth-I'm sorry. We can let you out in another three days, once we're sure that-"

"It'll be too late by then!" I didn't consciously decide to slam my fist against the glass hard enough to bruise it; it just happened. I breathed in and out a few times, trying to calm myself down. "Please, they're going to get themselves killed unless someone does something."

"If they're among the infested, then they should be all right in just a few days' time," the soldier said.

"They're not Controllers, they're Animorphs," I said sharply.

Her eyes widened, and she looked me over in surprise.

"Jake Berenson is my kid brother, and he's only sixteen years old," I pleaded. "Rachel just turned seventeen, and she has two little sisters that worship her, and her mom has been through hell already and can't lose her-"

"What's your name?" the soldier asked.

"I'm Tom," I said. "Tom Berenson."

She nodded. "Private Leslie Burke."

"Please, if there's anything you can do to prove I'm not infested-I'll go through an MRI, I'll do anything-"

"I'll let you know if we have any news about either of them," she said. Before I could keep arguing, she turned and walked away.

I stood there in silence, staring after her and trying to catch my breath.

"Nice try," the little girl in the cell next door said. Her hair was pulled back into pigtails tied with pink elastics, and she couldn't be more than six years old. "You seriously end up with Jake Berenson's brother for a host, or was that all bullshit to get their sympathy?"

"I hope you starve to death and burn in hell," I informed the yeerk.

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><p>An excruciating few hours went by, during which time the little girl next to me went from confidently promising to kill everyone to screaming impotent threats at anyone who walked past. Soldiers came back twice, once to drop a businessman in the cell on the other side of me and once to slot MREs through the door to all three of us. I ignored the food and the new houseguest in favor of banging on the wall and continuing to demand that they release me any time they came in, growing more frantic with the hours that passed. Neither group included Leslie, which gave me some hope that she actually was looking for a way to get me out.<p>

After the last group came and went and there was no sign of anyone else, we all lapsed into silence. I didn't know what the yeerks on either side of me were thinking-although I could take a guess at how desperately both the hosts were hoping that the human troops would keep us here long enough to starve out their yeerks.

Because there was no point in wondering what the hell was happening on the Blade Ship until I went insane, I started concentrating on remembering what my own body felt like instead. Over the next long unmeasurable period of time I discovered that I still sucked at talking clearly or doing any kind of complex motions, but I was getting to be a pro at opening and closing my eyes every time I tried to do so and standing in one place without losing my balance and falling over. Yippee.

"You tested out the Anti-Morphing Ray yet?" the businessman said at one point.

I looked up at him from where I'd been wiggling my fingers one by one, marveling at the novelty of being able to do so. "Go ahead and try it," I said dully. Maybe I'd get lucky and it'd simultaneously short out, kill the yeerk, and blow a hole in the wall large enough for me to morph a cobra and slither out.

It was more difficult than I remembered, knowing how to breathe, how to form words using my mouth. I kept finding myself doing things-standing up, scratching my nose, chewing my nails-without realizing that I was doing so. I'd been sending impulses from a panicked brain to an unresponsive body for so long it kept startling me when I realized that not only could I move, half the time I had already done so just by thinking about it. And then there were motions that seemed ridiculously simple that I had forgotten how to do: at one point I tried to run my fingers through my hair and bumped into my own forehead with my hand twice.

"You dare to speak to me using that tone, warrior?" the businessman was saying in the background. "I am Sub-Visser Eight, distinguished in battle for killing over twenty Andalite arisths and-"

I ignored him; he was talking to Essa 412, not to me, and anyway Essa was dead so I didn't have to answer if I didn't feel like it.

At least until he started banging on the wall that separated our cells and cursing at me. Then it got annoying.

"Tell me your rank and number immediately, before I decide that I should report you to Visser One for your insolence!" He was kicking the wall now, and it made a loud banging noise every time.

I turned around sharply to glare at him, climbing clumsily to my feet as I did so. "Essa four-one-two," I snapped. "Visser Seventeen. Yes, the little voice in my head can beat up the little voice in your head! And last I saw Visser One was in Animorph custody, so can you shut the hell up and die already?"

"I will kill you, you filthy traitor!" He started banging on the wall again.

"How you gonna do that, dumbass?" I asked, deliberately turning my back in the hope it would piss him off. "Glare me to death?"

"Give up," the little girl advised the other Controller. "I think this one's brain is empty."

I threw my hands up. "Thank you! You mind telling the nice people with guns that?"

She didn't respond to my question, staring me down with alien coldness. "You are a slave," she said quietly. "A pathetic, mewling microorganism that is part of a species so idiotic, so subject to its dumb animal impulses, that it was always meant to be subjugated. It doesn't matter that in this moment you have the tiny illusion of freedom. You are no more free than the whimpering animals locked in their cages around the yeerk pool, gasping at their tiny token moments of illusory control as they sprint in endless circles within their chains, believing that they are progressing when in fact they are only wearing themselves out sooner, bringing their weak meat-sack bodies closer to the moment when they will rot in the ground."

I'd taken a step back from the wall we shared. I wasn't sure when I had done so.

She didn't break eye contact with me, and she didn't vary from her cold tone. "You and every one of your species are only good to be used and wrung out until there is nothing left of you, so that the strong hands and keen eyes evolution has wasted on such small-minded beasts can be used to advance our glorious cause. You were born to be a slave, and you should fall down in thanks to worship the gods you invented that your slave body will be used to its last drop of energy by a species so much infinitely greater than your own that you cannot begin to comprehend our intelligence and willpower."

I shrugged, trying to look more nonchalant than I felt. "Yeah, well, only one of us is going to die in this cage, and it sure as hell isn't me," I said, amazed when my voice didn't shake. Much. "So you keep on believing in your long-term subjugation plan, and I'll keep right on believing in my short-term ability to go for more than three days without Kandrona."

The yeerk smiled at me, twisting the little girl's face into something ugly in the process. "The humans might be holding their own in this particular battle, but you know as well as I do who will win the war."

I wasn't sure what I was going to say in response, but just then the door to the cell block opened again and Leslie walked back in. She was still in uniform and still armed, but her blond hair hung loose against her back in a way that made her look no older than I was, and her expression was dull with exhaustion.

I walked eagerly to the corner of the cell nearest to her, even though I knew that I wouldn't be able to reach her if I tried.

"Tom." She stopped and took a deep breath before continuing to speak. She was watching me with pain in her expression, and she didn't want to say whatever it was she'd come to tell me.

Oh god.

My stomach fell through the floor. Blood roared into my ears so loudly that I almost missed when she spoke next.

"Jake is safe and unharmed," she said, and I remembered how to breathe. "The other Animorphs as well, except..." She put her hand against the glass as if she wanted to rest it against my arm but couldn't. "Rachel was reported killed in action earlier today. I'm so sorry."

I'm not sure if I sat down on the floor too quickly, or if I actually fell. Either way I found myself sitting in the corner where I'd been standing a second ago, head ringing and vision tilting in and out of focus. My body felt cold and numb all over, and I didn't seem to be breathing correctly.

It shouldn't have been a shock. I should have known.

_Rachel._

I had known before. If I was honest with myself I had known. I had seen all those claws sink into the thick grizzly fur, had heard her scream inside my mind. I'd frozen, the moment that Essa had crawled free, too caught up in saving my own skin to try and go back for her, and now she was-

"Thank you. For letting me know," I heard myself say. I think I probably garbled the words.

Leslie said something else-I don't know what-and walked out again. I pulled my legs up to my chest, rested both arms on top of my knee, and leaned forward to brace my forehead against the heat of my arm. I'm not sure whether or not I was crying; none of my senses seemed to be working correctly and I wasn't consciously in control of my own body.

I couldn't tell if my vision was swaying back and forth or if my whole body was. I'd been cut off again.

She was seventeen years old. Seventeen. Because she'd just had a birthday.

She spent way too much time picking out clothes and she could play in the mud for hours and still have perfect hair. She talked me into climbing onto the roof of her dad's tool shed with her when we were eight and ten years old, and she didn't even cry when she fell off and broke her arm. She knew the lyrics to every song Alanis Morissette had ever written but had a terrible singing voice. She would fall off a balance beam thirteen times in a row and still pick herself up like nothing had happened and climb right back up just in case she got it right the fourteenth time.

Jordan and Sarah thought Rachel had hung the stars. Aunt Naomi sighed every time she talked about her grades but took off work every time to attend her gymnastics meets.

She lost her first tooth when she was four and started a fight with a boy twice her age on the playground. She never got a driver's license.

She was loved, and she was feared. Both with good reason.

It should have been enough. Enough that someone, somewhere, would choose to save her.

The last thing I heard before I lost consciousness from shock and exhaustion was the little girl, laughing so loudly that I could hear her through the glass dividing my cage from hers.


	2. Limacine

I woke up what felt like several hours later still curled in the same cramped position. While I waited for the yeerk to wake up as well and start moving my body, I tried to figure out what had jolted me out of sleep so suddenly. It didn't take long; the little girl was no longer laughing. Now she was screaming.

"Let me out of here, you animals!" she was yelling shrilly. "This is murder, you hear me? Murder! Where's your sense of decency? What about _humanity_?"

I could hear the sneer in the last word.

She went on like that for a while, which meant she had to be getting close to the fugue state before the end. In the meantime I finally caught on to the fact that there was no yeerk in my head and I could stand up myself if I wanted to. My limbs didn't cooperate at first and I fell flat on my face trying to kneel, but by using the wall for support I finally got my legs under me.

"You!" The yeerk had noticed I was awake, and was pointing imperiously at me. "Slave! You tell them that this is-is-_inhuman_! I will not be left here to starve by these cruel, slow-witted-"

"Please try to die faster," I said. My voice was hoarse; even if I hadn't been crying I definitely sounded like I had. "Do us all a favor."

She _screamed_, wordless and siren-like, her head tilted back and her fists clenched as her face turned a worrying shade of red. I was starting to wonder why I had ever found her remotely frightening the day before.

I tuned her out and walked to the back of the cell. There was a water bottle with the suspicious-looking astronaut food the soldiers had left earlier, so I cracked it open and took a few sips. It felt good against my throat.

Lacking the willpower and the coordination to do anything else, I sat down cross-legged and pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the back wall. Rachel's death hadn't sunk in yet. My mind kept shying away from any thought of her, which made me feel like a goddamn coward, because she was _gone_, and there wasn't anything else I should think about more. It was partly my fault for getting infested in the first place, and partly my fault for not trying harder to save her in the end, and she deserved better than to have me sitting here mentally humming Britney Spears music to block out the sound of the yeerk dying next door when she was-

I didn't even know what she was. I didn't think that anyone had come up with words for it yet.

Light-headed and miserable, I let my mind drift away from my body again. The yeerk in the next cell went quiet after a while.

At some point I glanced up, and the little girl was sitting on the ground staring into space. The fugue had started, then. Although it might have looked quiet on the outside, I knew that inside the kid trapped in her own mind was going through a whole new circle of hell. I watched her for another few minutes, wishing there was something I could do but knowing I was helpless to stop what was happening to her.

I was curled up in the corner of a tiny, inescapable cell, watching and listening as the world moved around me and my family died and a six-year-old stranger lost her mind, and I couldn't do a damn thing about it. Yeah, this felt pretty fucking familiar. Only difference was the cage happened to be physical right now.

"Hey, sweetheart." The businessman in the cell on the other side spoke up suddenly, and I glanced over. He was leering at Leslie, who had just walked back in. "You want to know all the things _this _human body wants to do to _that _hot little human body?"

Leslie didn't even blink. "Wanna know the things _this_ human wants to do to _you_, you filthy earthworm?" she asked flatly. She turned away. "Tom? You doing all right?" she called.

I walked over to her. "What is it?" I could hear my voice shaking. The last time she hadn't exactly brought good news.

"Just thought you'd like to know," she said. "Your brother officially declared victory about an hour ago. A couple Andalite princes, most of the U.N. leaders not in custody right now, and a rep from the Council of Thirteen all signed the peace accord." She broke a smile for the first time since I'd first seen her. "Humanity one, yeerks zero."

I exhaled slowly. "Go team," I said dully. It didn't exactly come as a surprise by now.

"You'll have to thank Jake for, well, everyone, but make sure you include me." She was grinning even more now. "I'm off-duty already, and my plans consist mostly of getting embarrassingly drunk to celebrate, but I figured I'd come down and let you know." She turned down the cell block, where the other boxes in the row were now filled. "You hear that?" she yelled. "We win! Suck it, space slugs! _We win_! Whoo-hoo!"

She turned to wave to me as she walked out, and I managed to wave back.

The little girl was still silent, but now she had started shaking where she sat.

Personally, I thought it was a little soon to be celebrating.

* * *

><p>I could tell the exact minute it happened; the little girl suddenly broke her zombified silence by bursting into tears. She grabbed at her face and flung the dead yeerk away from herself-it hit the glass on the front of the cell with a faint <em>splat<em> and fell on the ground-and curled up in a ball, rocking back and forth as she sobbed so hard her breath came in hiccups.

Yeah, I could appreciate the feeling.

"Hey," I said quietly, walking over to that wall. "Hey, you all right?"

I wanted to kick myself for asking the world's stupidest question, but at least it got her to look over at me. In response she shook her head so hard her hair flapped against her face.

"Yeah, I kinda figured." I sat down as close to the wall as I could get, pressing my hands against the glass. "That sucked, huh?" I knew it was an idiotic understatement, but damned if I knew anything about talking to kids.

She hunched her shoulders, hugging herself hard enough that her fingers pressed deep into her skin, and nodded slowly. She was shivering hard despite the moderated temperature of the cell block, her lips starting to turn faintly purple-probably going into shock. I could only pray that someone had been watching on the monitors when the yeerk came out and that the soldiers would be back soon, because I'd long since figured out that yelling at the cameras wasn't going to do a damn thing to make anyone listen.

I longed to run in there and pick her up, get her out of the room where the thing that had taken her body was still lying dead on the floor. I couldn't. I could only watch, and not do a thing.

I was long since used to the feeling. Didn't mean I wasn't sick of it.

"Can you come here?" I asked the girl.

She tried to stand up, almost fell, and just scooted on her butt until she was sitting directly on the other side of the wall from me. I didn't know if the clumsiness was a byproduct of the shock or if, like me, she'd lost the knack of moving on her own.

"My name's Tom. What's yours?" I asked her.

She mumbled something.

"Sorry, what was that?" I tried to sound pleasant, casual. The last thing I needed was her getting even more freaked out if she thought I was mad at her.

She grimaced and tried again. "Anne with an 'e'," she whispered at last.

"I'm Tom. But Anne's a good name to have," I said. "Easy to spell, and all. Shit, how old are you anyway?"

So maybe I shouldn't have cursed in front of the kid, but at least now she was watching me and paying attention to something other than the yeerk on the ground. Her eyes were a striking shade of greenish-grey I hadn't noticed before, and stood out against her black hair and pale brown skin in a way that made her look almost angelic.

"I'm five an' a half," Anne mumbled.

"What the hell'd they infest you for?" I blurted.

Anne hunched forward further, pushing out her bottom lip. "I don't _know_!"

"Shit, just, forget I ever said that, okay? I know that they just picked people randomly." I knew she hadn't done anything wrong, hadn't signed up for the Sharing, hadn't gone through any locked doors or wandered into any members-only meetings clearly marked as such. She hadn't deserved to get grabbed off the street and had a yeerk stuck in her head. And god did I not need to put that line of thought in her head. Essa only knew the number of hours I'd spent wondering whether they would have left me alone if I'd been a little less physically fit at the time, if I'd played a little less basketball and eaten a few more hamburgers.

"I want my dad," Anne told me quietly through her tears, like she was confessing to a crime.

"Me too." I leaned forward until my nose was almost pressed against the glass; she scooted a little closer to me as well. "Is your dad a co- Did he have a yeerk in his head too?"

"No," she said calmly, "he's dead."

Oh. "I'm sorry," I said after a delay during which I tried to remember if there was anything else you were supposed to say in situations like this.

"Why?" She tilted her head at me.

"I'm sorry it happened," I explained. "Not because..." Well, shit, for all I knew I _had_ been the one to kill him after all. My hands had killed a lot of people.

She didn't answer, staring into space. If that was what I looked like when I zoned out inside my own head, then it was intensely creepy.

"Anne?" I said.

She kept looking blankly at the wall.

"Anne, do you have someone you can stay with?" I tried again.

She drew in a shuddering breath and shook herself all over, clearly trying to come back into her own body. "What?" she said.

"Is there someone you can stay with when you get out of here?" I repeated.

She shrugged her shoulders up but didn't drop them again, looking down at her hands sitting loosely in her lap. "Yeah." She didn't elaborate.

"Okay. Okay, good."

She said something else, so quiet I didn't catch it.

"What was that?" I asked, leaning forward until my breath misted against the glass separating us.

"'m scared," she repeated, not much louder.

"Hey, hey, it's gonna be okay," I said, wishing for the umpmillionth time that I could reach her. "I'm scared too. But we're gonna be all right, okay?"

"I miss her," Anne whispered.

Okay, clearly we weren't talking about her dad anymore, but other than that I had nothing. "Who's that?" I asked.

Anne hunched her shoulders further forward, hair falling in front of her face.

"Who do you miss, Anne?"

"Nistril eight-six-one," she answered at last in a mumble.

A chill ran down my arms. I looked over at the dead yeerk on the floor.

Oh.

Anne hunched even further forward until she was almost folded in half.

I should probably say something. Something reassuring. I felt a little sick to my stomach. Nothing was coming to mind.

"Her mom and dad were dead too," Anne whispered. "So I guess no one cares she's gone."

I sat there in silence, mind a blank computer screen as I tried to come up with something to say, until the door to the cell block opened and several of the army people walked in.

"Ms. Shirley?" one of the soldiers said, while another one opened the door of her cell. "There's a woman here who says she's your aunt."

Anne nodded, scrambling to her feet. She looked tiny and helpless, walking out surrounded by all the strapping adults in uniform, and I stood up to watch her go.

She never turned to look back at me.

* * *

><p>Time passed some more. The soldiers dropped off a few more MREs. I picked at a little bit of the food but wasn't that hungry, especially not for rehydrated mystery mush.<p>

The rest of the time I just stared into space, zoned out and letting my mind wander. Fortunately I could do it without effort by now. Having a yeerk in your head is like being in solitary confinement: either you get pretty good at keeping yourself entertained in the absence of anything to do, or you go insane. Or both.

I didn't think about Rachel. I thought about anything but Rachel. I came up with lots of things that didn't have to do with her terrifying, incomprehensible loss, and I thought about them. Sometimes I succeeded in doing this for as much as thirty seconds at a time before my thoughts circled back to grief.

Like the fact that it was _weird_, not having a yeerk in my head.

I didn't miss Essa-seriously, I didn't, it wasn't like that-but it was weird being alone in my own head. Like I was missing something. Just not something I actually missed.

It was like the time when I was eight years old and had just lost a tooth, and my cousin Saddler (who was seven and of the opinion that he already knew everything) sagely informed me that if I poked at the empty gum with my tongue too many times then I would never grow a new tooth in that place. I was at the age where the idea of having to get a gold tooth instead of growing a new one sounded incredibly cool, so I took to probing at that strange blank stretch of skin every chance I got. For the next couple months until the new tooth came in I never actually stopped being surprised every time that where there should have been bone all I felt was unprotected skin against my jaw, like I had a nerve exposed there.

Only this time it was my entire brain, which kept relentlessly probing, looking for a yeerk that wasn't there. Like my entire nervous system was surprised every time it tried to do something and there wasn't another presence there blocking it.

Essa was dead. It didn't matter.

Saddler was gone too. I didn't know whether or not he'd died in the war, but he'd made a miraculous recovery from a fatal coma and then two days later disappeared out of his locked room and was never seen again, so I was pretty sure that some kind of aliens had been involved somehow.

The past few years had sucked pretty hard for my whole family. For the whole species, I guess.

I dozed off uneasily and dreamed about being able to walk around on my own because my conscious mind had forgotten that that was something I could do now. I woke up when the middle-aged guy in the box to the left of mine suddenly got up, staggered across the cell, and vomited into the toilet in the corner.

I propped myself up on my elbows, watching him with detached interest. I could only assume that his yeerk had died as well at some point and I hadn't noticed; it was lying on the floor where he had been sitting a minute ago. When he was done coughing and spitting up bile he pushed himself unsteadily to his feet and stalked back across the cell. He lifted one loafer-covered foot to stomp down and grind the yeerk's body into the floor.

"Don't," I said.

He lowered his foot, looking over at me. "Why the hell not?" he asked hoarsely.

"That's your ticket out of here," I pointed out. "Probably work better if it's not a smear on the ground."

He looked at the yeerk, back at me, and then turned away from it and sat down with a sigh. "What's your name?" he asked after a minute.

I didn't answer, awash in apathy. I went back to looking at the ceiling instead.

"I'm George Little," he said without being asked.

Then again, playing along would probably be less effort than trying to ignore him. "Tom." I left it at that, not wanting to get into my last name.

"Nice to meet you," George said, like we were at a fucking cocktail party.

I didn't care one way or another about meeting him, but didn't bother to say that.

"So you're actually human?" he asked after a minute, apparently not getting a clue that I wasn't in the mood for small talk.

"All my life," I said dryly. I gave up and rolled onto my side to face him, propping my head up on one fist.

"No, I mean..." He sighed. "You're not infested."

I laughed. It came out sounding weird and bitter. "Mind telling the guys with guns that? I want to go home."

"You got a home to go to?" He ran a hand over his short hair, looking as exhausted as I felt.

I thought about it for a second, and then favored him with a one-shouldered shrug. "Think my house is probably gone." The sudden thought of Homer, left alone and defenseless in the house when it had blown up, crashed over me like an icy wave of salt water. Don't think about it, I told myself. Don't think about it. I'd thought about it before. Jesus, don't think about Homer, waiting so trustingly for his humans to come home, not understanding what was happening even as-

"Tom?"

I shook myself a little. It was probably the sixth or seventh time George had said my name. Suddenly I was really damn invested in this conversation. Anything to distract myself.

"What happened to your house?" George said.

"I'm from Santa Barbara," I explained. Just our luck that we'd been living on top of a yeerk pool. Just our luck that Jake or someone had decided to blow it up.

"No shit?" George snorted. "Tough luck. Me too."

I suspected that was going to be true of a lot of the soon-to-be-ex Controllers waiting in cells right now. The yeerks had started the invasion in Southern California largely by chance, but once they were there it was far easier just to keep grabbing hosts right in the area where they had established infrastructure rather than breaking out to new areas with potentially unstable Kandrona supplies.

"That said, I think my family's okay," I added. Most of them, anyway. "My parents were infested but they were well away from the main battle so they should be fine, and apparently my little brother's off bossing around the United Nations and the Council of Thirteen."

"Seriously?" George said.

"Kid's pretty bossy when he wants to be, so I'm sure he'll be fine," I said.

I knew I was selling Jake short. "Bossy" wasn't the word for his ability to sit you down and calmly explain why jumping off a bridge was a good idea for several different reasons and always have the end result that half an hour later you'd be standing on the edge of a bridge wondering why you hadn't thought of the brilliant idea of bridge-jumping years ago but only grateful that you had come up with the concept all on your own today. But I wasn't lying about my confidence in his ability to figure out a way to end the war without the entire planet ending up in the possession of the andalite army.

George nodded. "I don't fuckin' know about my own family," he said, staring down at his hands, resting limply in his lap. "My son's been missing since around the time my wife and I got taken, and the yeerk in my wife's head was posted in Santa Barbara when the yeerk pool blew. Pretty sure both my parents were killed as well."

I shuddered; he had delivered all of that in the same inflectionless tone. "I... I'm so sorry. And, um, good luck," I stammered. I hadn't thought to consider myself lucky until this moment, but now I was feeling the overwhelming urge to smash my way out of here, find my family, lock them in a room, and never let them go out into the dangerous world again.

George made a horrible choked-off sound. "Hey, at least the NSA will probably give me my old job back when they know I didn't _willingly _share state secrets with a bunch of civilians."

"You worked for the NSA?" I said, pathetically desperate for a topic change. "What's that like?"

"Pays the bills," he said. "Although there's a ton of travel involved, which is hell when you've got a kid." He made another small sound like he was trying to breathe through the urge to start crying. "God I hope he's okay."

I sat up, making eye contact with him for the first time. "You know a lot of the people who went missing from our area were infested then transferred off world, right? And that all those hosts are going to come back now?"

He smiled tightly at me. "I hope you're right."

"Happens all the time," I said confidently. "Friend of my brother's had his mom go missing in a boating accident, everyone thought she died, and then eighteen months after it happened Visser One walked into a Sharing meeting wearing her body. I'd have swallowed my own tongue from surprise if it was up to me."

This time his smile was a little more genuine-looking.

The door to the cell block opened again.

"Hey, I'll, uh, see what I can do about getting them to let you out," George told me.

"Thank you," I said.

One of the soldiers punched something into the keypad next to the door to his cell, and it slid open. "Mr. Little, I'm afraid there's no one here to retrieve you," the soldier said quietly. "Do you have somewhere you can go?"

George straightened up, clearly trying to look confident. "Can you get me a ride to Fort Meade?" he asked.

A couple of the soldiers glanced at each other. "We can probably get you as far as Anne Arundel," one of the guys said. "Getting into the fort is going to have to be your problem."

George nodded. "That I can handle."

He did turn back as they were leading him away. "Tom?" he said.

I stood up. "Yeah?"

"Can you do me a favor?" he asked.

I made a vague gesture around myself to encompass the fact that I was currently trapped in a glass box with no exits so there wasn't much I could do, but I didn't say no.

George smiled. "When you get back to Santa Barbara, if you happen to run into a blond kid, about sixteen years old, answers to David... Could you tell him that I'm okay? That I'm going to be staying in the D.C. area for a while? He'll know how to get ahold of me."

"Sure," I said.

"You promise you'll send him my way if you see him?" George asked.

"I promise. David, right?" I said.

"That's right." He gave me another one of those tight, stoic smiles, and then turned to follow the guards out of the room.


	3. Eleutherophobia

I killed time with sadistic abandon, letting it die in unnoticed increments. The soldiers came back a few more times with more food and more Controllers, refilling the cells on either side of me. I ignored both.

Early on the fourth morning since I'd been there, a couple soldiers finally came in without food or people and approached my cell. I stood up from where I'd been sitting and staring at the wall, keeping my hands low and in sight.

"Guess you were telling the truth, then, son," one guy said. I realized, a little late, that it was the older man with the scar on his forehead who had taken me in earlier. "Welcome back."

"Uh-huh," I said. I might have been ruder if I wasn't so exhausted, still crashing from the one long battle the past three years had been and not sure what I was supposed to do with freedom now I apparently had it.

"Right this way, then," the soldier from before said. "You're being released to your next of kin."

It was bizarre to walk outside and see a sixteen-year-old kid barefoot in jeans in the middle of the base, surrounded by so many high-ranking army officers-all of whom saluted him as they passed. Even more bizarre to remember the number of times I'd put band-aids on his knees and talked him down from jumping off the back porch with an umbrella and a blanket cape.

Reckless bravery has always been a family trait, I guess.

I hesitated a little before saying anything to him. It was stupid to be awkward in front of my own little brother, but I hadn't actually seen him since he'd tried to kill me. Not that I blamed him, but... weird. And then there was the fact that I hadn't actually had a single conversation with him since I'd wished him luck on basketball tryouts before leaving for school in the morning over three years ago.

"Hi," Jake said. His expression and his voice were strained with blankness, some combination of the necessary formality of the Acting Commander in Chief of Planet Earth and the crushing weight of grief he had to be feeling as well.

"Hey, you." I gave him a tiny smile. It was inadequate, stilted, but still better than trying to say any of the seven billion things that needed saying between us with fifty army guys watching.

"Thank you, General Patton," Jake said to the man to my left.

God. I had barely seen him in months. He'd gotten taller, I noticed. Or maybe he just stood taller, like an adult and not a teenager.

The general saluted. "It's an honor, sir. Anything I can do, sir."

Jake nodded. "I'll keep in touch."

I walked outside a step behind him, blinking in the sudden sunshine. Beyond the fence of the compound, the concrete road was lined on either side with cherry trees in blossom. After so long in army bases-both human and yeerk-I was a little taken aback by the tiny pale petals blowing against my skin, the scent of fresh grass carried to us by the breeze.

For a second we stood there, Jake either giving me a moment to adjust or just as disoriented by the ordinariness of the street as I was. There were no cars on the street directly in front of us, no bug fighters or dome ships overhead. It was quiet, except for the sound of the American flag snapping in the wind, halfway down its pole. Half-mast. Rachel. Jesus, _Rachel_.

It kept hitting me out of nowhere, again and again.

I turned to Jake, not sure what I was going to say to him, and found him staring at the flag as well with his jaw clenched so hard his entire face was drawn tight around those harsh muscles.

"C'mere, squirt," I said roughly. He took two steps and slammed into me, arms wrapping around my chest with painful force. He buried his face in my shoulder, barely making a sound as he started sobbing.

"I thought you were dead," he whispered into my shoulder, voice wet and nearly incoherent. "I thought that you..."

I hung onto him a little tighter. "Sorry to disappoint you, then."

He made another small sound-probably not laughing at my utter lack of humor, which anyway came too close to the truth for me not to feel like an asshole for having said it-and grabbed a double handful of my t-shirt against my back. We stood like that for a few long minutes while Jake gasped for air against my collarbone and I stroked an uncertain hand over his shaking arm.

"It's over, now," I told him as he cried, "It's over." It was inadequate, but what was I supposed to tell him? That I understood, when I really had no way of doing so? That it was okay, when Rachel was dead and there was nothing _okay_ about the world? That Jake should calm down, when he'd been shoving his own pain aside to be the public face of the revolution for months now?

The skin of my shoulder was wet through my shirt when he finally pulled away by a few inches, looking away as he scrubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hand. I left my hand on his arm, wanting to ground myself as much as him.

"Are you all right?" he asked, glancing me over.

"Fuck, no," I said tiredly.

Caught off guard, he smiled a little bit, ducking his head. As soon as he caught himself doing it his expression went stricken. He brought a hand up as if to cover his mouth, but dropped it. "Tom," he whispered. "I don't know if you already... But R-Rachel, she-"

"I know." It came out wrong, hoarse, with almost no volume to it.

Jake nodded once, sharply, eyes closed. "Um," he said. "Mom and Dad."

"Shit, are they okay?" I blurted. I hadn't even thought-last I'd heard both yeerks had been deployed off on the east coast somewhere, far away from the destruction over southern California. I'd assumed they were okay, as okay as they could be when infested-

"They're being held at the naval base in Annapolis," Jake said quickly. "It's about an hour east of here. We can probably go get them now."

"Okay." I let out a deep breath in relief, running a hand through my hair. I glanced around the street. "Do you have a car?" I turned back to Jake, squinting at him. "Do you have a license?"

It was probably a moot point-who the hell was going to pull over the military commander of the entire planet?-but Jake actually smiled at me as he shook his head. "Do you have a bird morph?" he countered.

"Oh," I said, feeling dumb. "Yeah."

He waited for me to start morphing before he began himself. It was the first time I'd actually morphed myself outside of the panicked mid-fall string of changes I'd done, and it was weird and a little jarring to see the patterns of dark feathers begin to emerge from my half-melted skin and to have to tell myself to keep going, not to freak out and change back.

By the time I finished my morph Jake had already long since finished his and fluttered up to land on the top of the army base fence. It was good thinking on his part to give himself some space, because the instant the golden eagle's instincts snapped into place I had to fight down the urge to go hunt the little peregrine falcon sitting so trustingly close.

{Show-off,} I told him, by way of letting him know I was in control again. Compared to fighting against a yeerk, fighting against a bird's instincts to feed was pretty much cake.

Jake ducked his head. {We probably should have started out somewhere higher.}

Sure enough, it took a lot of undignified flapping for us to get going, although the thermals created by all the paved surfaces in D.C. made it easier to get momentum.

It was fascinating watching Jake fly; he never overflapped, never hesitated or lost altitude in the process of adjusting position, never made all the little mistakes a human trying to work as a bird should have made. God only knew how much practice it took for him simply to _know _how to use the instincts that would help him and ignore the ones that only distracted, but I could tell he was doing it. By comparison I felt clumsy and inefficient, using more effort than I should just to keep in the air.

We flew in silence until we were somewhere over the Maryland woods, when Jake suddenly said, {Bald eagle, eight o'clock,} and tilted over to fly in close to my left wing.

I had to glance around to find it-once again I had completely missed a detail of flying that Jake knew instinctively-but when I did I jolted in surprise. Even though Jake had warned me, there was a tiny part of my brain that saw the brown and white silhouette and automatically thought _Rachel_. And then I remembered all over again. Bam. Punch in the head. Too much blood soaking through thick grizzly fur. A human scream of pain, inside my mind.

It was a good thing the golden eagle knew what to do, because if I'd been the only one in charge of flying I'd have fallen out of the sky.

When I was back in the moment and back in control-Jake had started looking like food again for a second there-I asked, {You okay?} Jake had to have been slapped in the face by seeing the eagle the same way I had.

{Sure,} he said casually. {I could outrun it if I had to, but I'm not looking to start a dogfight in midair right now.}

He had to know that that wasn't what I was asking about, but I let it be. Now wasn't the right time to start some kind of deep conversation. I wanted to ask where he'd been for the past three days, how the others were doing, whether he had lost anyone else in the battle, but talking with thought-speak was like talking on the phone: all I had was his voice, with no hints from his face or his posture to tell me what he was really thinking. It would be too easy for him to lie.

A little while later, as we were traveling over a brick-paved town square, Jake said, {Look for the sports fields by the college. They're easier to spot than the buildings.}

I realized what he was talking about almost as soon as he said it: there, up ahead, were several large patches of bright green interlaced with white boundary lines.

I coasted down to land in the middle of the baseball diamond and started to demorph. Jake dove down after me and flared his wings seconds before he would have hit the ground, human skin already emerging from underneath the feathers. He touched down delicately on the ground, landing on human feet seconds before the last traces of beak disappeared.

"All right," I said, once I was completely demorphed. "Now you're definitely just showing off, you little brat."

Jake smiled. It was faint and stilted, but I still counted it as a victory. This was a hell of a lot harder than giving him Batman stickers to make him forget about scraped knees had ever been.

He didn't say anything, turning and walking across the college campus until he reached an office building. He ignored the receptionist inside the front door and walked straight into a back room, down a long hallway and through a door that he had to enter a code in order to open. I didn't question how he knew where to go or what to do; he probably could have led us to a Blade Ship, sat down at the controls, and I'd sit down right next to him and trust him to navigate us through z-space.

The door he stopped at was unmarked and unlocked, but there was a Gleet Biofilter built into the frame. I eyed it warily, hesitating before stepping through-the only ones I had ever seen had all been wired to fry any life forms without a yeerk attached-but Jake didn't even glance at it before he walked through with no problems, so after a second I followed him. I jumped when it made a small beeping noise, but apparently it was set to kill only yeerks or something, because I made it through unharmed.

After the high-tech security on the door, walking into the room beyond and finding only another receptionist sitting at another desk surrounded by more fake potted plants was a little disappointing. This one was doodling on his notepad where the previous one had been chewing gum, but he still looked ordinary.

"Name?" the receptionist said, not looking up.

"Um, Jake," Jake said, and left it at that.

"I think he could probably use a last name too, doofus," I said, elbowing him gently.

He blinked. "Oh. I-"

"Actually I just need the name of whoever you're here to retrieve," the receptionist said into his desk, sounding even more bored than before.

"Jeanette and Steven Berenson, then," I sad.

That got him to look up for the first time, mouth slightly open in surprise. His eyes skimmed right over me and landed on Jake. His mouth opened a little further-

"Do you have them or not?" I demanded, cutting off whatever it was he was about to say.

"Um." He glanced back at me, squinting as if trying to figure out whether I was an Animorph too. "Yeah, yeah, they're..." He looked at his computer for the first time, typing something in. "Should be out in a few minutes. Please wait here."

"Thank you," I said sharply.

Shooting me one more suspicious glance, he stood up and ducked through a back door of the office. The only thing we could hear him say before the door swung shut behind him was "Dude, you'll never guess who's in the front office!"

After he walked away we were left waiting in said front office. And waiting. And waiting. After about five minutes I remembered that I could sit down on my own if I wanted to, and dropped into one of the chairs next to the door. Jake paced rapidly, glancing toward each of the exits, tension in his shoulders (a really bad joke about caged tigers tried to wander through my mind and I shut it down). Another weird little thing that had changed since the war: three years ago Jake would have been the one sitting more or less quietly and daydreaming while I folded paper airplanes or bounced on my seat or tried to see how many three-point shots I could make in the trash can using a wad of paper.

But I'd long since gotten used to sitting quietly and observing everything that happened around me, unable to speak or blink or scratch my nose, unable even to move my eyes half a degree to the right if I got bored contemplating my current field of vision. So I sat, and I watched Jake cross my field of vision, and I tried not to think about how exhausting the freedom to control my own every movement was proving to be. Meanwhile Jake checked every exit three times, looked behind the desk for hidden shredder cannons, and glanced around quickly every time there was a noise from the back rooms.

I had to remind myself a second time that I could get up and move if I felt like it (it was freaking me out a little, how much I was apparently out of the habit of moving myself, of speaking voluntarily), but when I did I cleared my throat and then said, "They'll probably be okay. Government's taking care of it."

Jake glanced at me, and then walked behind the desk again and sat at the computer and started typing.

"Don't think you're supposed to be doing that," I pointed out. We were in a government building-for all I knew they could arrest us for snooping on someone else's chat room history.

Jake shrugged and started clicking through some kind of series. "Mom and Dad are both uninfested," he said at last. "It says, uh, 'voluntary exit,' which I'm guessing means-"

"No fugue state," I finished.

He nodded, expression grim. He had to know better than I did what kind of hell they had been spared by not having yeerks starve to death in their heads. I'd never had it happen to me, only ever heard the stories.

Jake, on the other hand...

It had taken me a while to figure out what it had meant when Temrash 114 had possessed one of the "andalite bandits" and then never been seen again right around the time Jake had spent three days acting incredibly weird, but when I had done the math at last I'd wanted to get sick. Not only was it horrifying to think that my kid brother had been infested, and had been forced to go through the yeerk's fugue as it died... That also meant that sensitive, goofy Marco, dress-wearing would-be gymnast Rachel, and the other thirteen-year-olds had all dragged a sentient creature out into the woods and watched it starve to death with no apparent remorse.

"Jake," I said quietly.

He tensed, stepping away from the computer. "Yeah?"

"If you want to talk at all..."

"I don't." He shook his head, but he glanced over at me. "Unless you want to."

I shook my head back at him.

"Okay, then," he said.

"Yeah, okay." I left it alone.

We sat for another few minutes, and then he said, "Mom and Dad-"

"Yeah?" I felt like some kind of animal wrangler trying to draw out an easily spooked cat. Was I supposed to stay quiet or would that make him clam up? What if I said the wrong thing?

"They're going to need us, aren't they?" Jake said quietly.

"Probably." I understood what he was saying. They hadn't gotten used to this shit, hadn't been in the game long enough to be forced to adjust the way that Jake and I both had. I didn't know if that would make it better or worse for them.

Brooding on what had happened wasn't going to do me any good. I switched to humming inside my own head, more out of habit than anything else-Essa 412 had violently despised Britney Spears's music, so I had made a point to memorize almost her entire discography whenever songs came on at Sharing meetings and play the tunes back every time I got the chance-but stopped when I realized I was trying to annoy the voice in my head that was no longer there.

Instead I started mentally cataloguing the feeling of the t-shirt I was wearing against my skin, the faint sound of the air conditioning unit that wasn't doing a thing about the Maryland summer heat, and the billion other details about the room that filtered through when I let them. I knew that I could spend hours concentrating just on the feeling of one joint of one finger, focusing all of my energy just on _feeling _its exact position and the touch of air against the skin, all with the end goal that if I could just concentrate hard enough I could move it...

I sighed out loud. And then I wiggled my finger just to prove to myself I could.

Was this seriously all my life had become, a series of increasingly pathetic attempts to poke futilely at the alien in my head? First thing when I got out of here I was going to go find an actual fucking hobby.

Feeling rebellious-even though there was nothing left to rebel against-I started mentally undressing Sarah Jessica Parker, just because I _could_ without anyone else knowing about it.

Of course, it was the exact moment that I started thinking about sex again for the first time in over three years that the door opened and my parents walked in.

They looked terrible. Mom's hair was a matted mess of snarls, and Dad just looked _old_, all frown lines and grey skin. But their smiles when they saw Jake and I were absolutely genuine. I let them hug Jake (who had his public face back on even though Mom and Dad were both crying) and talk about how proud of him they were, staying where I was for the moment. Maybe they understood better now what had been happening at the time, but the last time either one of them had seen me I'd been pointing a dracon beam at Dad's chest as two hork-bajir forced Mom's head under the surface of the yeerk pool. That had to leave an impression.

And then Mom's arms were wrapped around me before I had any time to think about it. "It's okay, baby, you're safe now," she whispered. "You're going to be okay, we've got you."

"Mom," I said, letting my eyes close. "Mom, I-"

"Shhh, shhh, you're okay," she said. It shouldn't have helped, not after everything, but it did. It made me feel safe just to stand there and let her hold me, like she could still protect me from the world. Like the threats were still outside my head and she could fight them off before they ever got to me.

Dad pulled me in as soon as she let go; he held on for less time but also squeezed tighter.

As if the day wasn't weird enough already, Mom turned to Jake like it was the most normal thing and said, "So, what do we do from here?"

Jake shrugged. He glanced toward the desk but the receptionist hadn't come back. "I guess we go," he said.

In the end we found a car at a rental agency just down the road from the college, one that didn't mind the battered credit card Dad produced from a back pocket and gave him a discount on the Honda minivan older than I was for the sake of everything being so insane at the moment. Jake and I automatically climbed into the back seat while Mom started driving and Dad opened up a map in shotgun. It was almost like old times, except for the silence: not only did none of us bother making conversation, but Dad tried the radio only once before finding on a rapid skim-through that it was mostly news and no music before he gave up and turned it off.

We all stared out our respective windows. No one talked except when Dad occasionally pointed Mom in the right direction.

Twice I caught the rearview mirror at the right angle to see Mom crying silently as she drove. Once it was Dad who breathed in wetly and then started digging in the glove box for tissues. I don't know if Jake cried. I didn't; I wasn't sure I remembered how.

Four hours later, Mom's voice was steady and bright as she said, "So, where do you want to stop for dinner?"

This time, the silence was excruciating. Jake continued to stare into space like no one had spoken, and Dad was looking apathetically at the map.

"Just stop the first place you see," I suggested when it became clear no one else was going to say anything.

"Okay, honey." Mom's voice was still too cheerful to be natural.

The first place she saw proved to be a McDonald's. We all picked listlessly at hamburgers (sans extra happy) and tried to ignore the TV in the corner playing footage of Jake meeting with the andalite generals on the Washington Mall on Tuesday.

The only one who tried to make conversation was Dad, whose attempt consisted of asking if Jake had ever morphed a cow, and who gave up after Jake's answer consisted of "Once" and nothing else.

I stopped to use the bathroom once we were all done and by the time I got outside Jake was once again slouched in the backseat. Mom and Dad were outside the car, using some check of the windshield wipers as flimsy cover for a frantic, whispered conversation.

"What am I supposed to _do_?" Mom said quietly. I could hear she was on the verge of tears. "They're both so quiet, and after everything, are they even-"

"Hi guys, what're you talking about?" I said, not bothering to give them time to answer, just walking past them and sliding back into the car.

Jake wasn't staring into space. He was looking at Mom and Dad as they resumed their seats after a worried glance at each of us. As soon as they were both distracted by looking at the road he turned to look at me.

I shrugged.

He turned away, grimacing.

Mom didn't mention stopping for the night, and neither did anyone else, so she kept driving as the sun went down in front of us and street lights flickered on. There weren't that many other cars on the road, so we were making pretty good progress, even if there was no way we'd make it all the way to California tonight.

We stopped two more times to use the bathroom, and once so that Dad could take over driving while Mom fell asleep in the front passenger seat. No one suggested stopping for the night. I didn't know what our hurry was. There was probably nothing waiting for us in Santa Barbara except a giant hole in the ground and a bunch of ugly memories.

We were like the people from that shitty depressing book from English class, about the family who spends over four hundred pages road tripping to California only to find that California sucked even worse than wherever it was they left behind. I was pretty sure there was at least one dead dog in that book too. I think there was supposed to be a moral somewhere in there about the plight of American migrant workers, but all I ever got out of it was that the characters' lives were unlivably awful and that apparently the entire in-book universe had organized itself around the sole principle of making them miserable.

In our case it wasn't a sadistic Great American Novelist. It was just yeerks, and from them it was nothing personal.

God my mind was a weird place these days.

The night had long since given way to another day when I glanced over at Jake and found him white-faced and shaking, drawing breath in tiny pants and staring into space.

Cursing myself for not paying more attention, I opened my mouth to say his name-and then shut it again, glancing toward our parents. I knew he wouldn't want them to know that he was... I didn't even know what was happening, but I could guess the gist of it.

There were probably better solutions, but only one occurred to me. I rested my hand on top of his wrist and started acquiring his DNA.

Almost immediately the drawstring-tight muscles of his shoulders and arms melted into relaxation and his breathing slowed down, his color returning to something more normal-looking as the trance stole over him. He turned to look at me and I was expecting accusation, but the expression on his face was painfully grateful. He even gave me a small, lazy smile.

Knowing the trance would only last as long as I stayed in contact with him, I left my hand there even as the position got uncomfortable. I didn't move even when my fingers got numb and my wrist cramped from the awkward angle, even as Jake slid gradually into peaceful sleep and tilted over in the seat so that I had to twist around to keep holding on to him.

If the silence in the car had started out heavy, by the time we were actually approaching Santa Barbara it was reaching toxic levels of density. Mom had her hands folded together on the dashboard so tightly that the beds of her nails were turning white. Dad kept shifting in his seat like he wanted to get up and run away from the road.

What the hell were we even doing?

We reached the first bombed-out city block on the eastern edge of the city. Dad stopped the car for a second, looking out over the shattered rubble of the familiar buildings. Maybe even more disturbing than the pockmarked office buildings and the apartment block that had sagged alarmingly sideways were the pockets of completely untouched real estate. The city looked like one of those photographs of tornado aftermaths where a straight line of buildings is torn to pieces and everything around is completely untouched. Only with more burn marks from dracon beams.

I kept my hand on Jake's wrist. He didn't need to see this.

Dad turned down the road that would lead to our neighborhood. None of us said anything as he navigated around cracked pavement and piles of rubble on the roads that weren't blocked off completely, forcing him to turn back repeatedly and look for a way around. I was getting less and less hopeful the closer we got to the place where our house had been four months ago, because the destroyed streets were becoming more common than the intact ones.

And then Dad, who I had never heard curse in front of us in his life, suddenly said "Ah, fuck it," and drove over the curb.

I decided that making a "who are you and what have you done with my father" joke would probably be grossly unfunny given the situation, but I was seriously considering it nonetheless as he ground the rented minivan across the grass, swerving around buildings and crossing over another street before bouncing right back over the curb on the other side and continuing to make a literal beeline for our house.

So much for prolonging the inevitable.

And yet, we were approaching our neighborhood (admittedly, not from any angle we'd ever approached it before) and we were still outside of the main crater where the yeerk pool had been. And then we pulled on to our street, and there was our house, scarred across the front from dracon fire but standing upright and unbroken.

I let go of Jake's wrist.

He jolted awake immediately with a gasp. When he looked at me I tilted my head toward the end of the street.

Dad pulled into our driveway and turned the car off. None of us moved for a second or two. We were all looking at the house.

"Anyone have a key?" Mom said at last.

I didn't know if she was actually joking or not, but I gave her a weak laugh anyway.

We all climbed out of the car, stretching. Dad especially was looking at the house like it had just materialized in front of us in some kind of miracle, but I think we all felt that way.

"You're up, squirt," I told Jake. "Cockroach, door frame, go."

Jake rolled his eyes but immediately started sprouting antennae. I turned away automatically. Mom and Dad, who clearly didn't know what to expect, watched the entire process in ever more grossed-out fascination until he was a shiny brown dot on the front sidewalk. He scurried up the front step, tiny legs powering him straight up the door frame until he reached a small crack in the wood just above the top hinge of the front door and squeezed through it.

"So that's how they keep getting inside," Mom murmured to herself.

It wasn't until we were waiting for him to demorph that the thought that Homer's decaying body might be somewhere in the house where Jake could discover it jolted through me. I took a step forward, not even sure what I was going to do about it now, but then the front door popped open. Jake gave a small, mocking bow.

"My hero," Mom said.

"And to think, otherwise we'd be reduced to jimmying a window like normal people," Dad said dryly, smiling at Jake.

"Yeah," I said, "heaven forbid we-"

Jake abruptly held up a hand to silence me, his head snapping around as he tracked a noise. I heard it too; there was something large moving through the bushes that ringed the house.

Orange fur was already sprouting down Jake's skin as he took a step toward the sound, but he didn't have time to morph more than that before a tan shape drove out of the bushes and tackled him hard enough to send him sprawling onto his back on the grass, and then proceeded to try to lick him to death.

Homer's fur was filthy and matted, and he'd lost too much weight to be healthy, but his tail was wagging so furiously it was a blurring arc of happiness in the air behind him as he continued to lavish kisses over every inch of Jake's skin that he could reach. And he was alive. It was impossible, perfect, the kind of good thing that didn't happen, and yet here he was.

I'm not sure what was making me grin harder: Homer's puppy-like yips of happiness as he kept on slobbering over Jake, or Jake's breathless, ecstatic laughter as he made weak attempts to fend off the golden retriever's expressions of adoration.

And for the first time the thought occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, we were going to be okay.

* * *

><p><strong>AN**: More to come in this same 'verse. Thank you for reading.


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